The Intent Half-Life

Every system has two components - the mechanism (what it does) and the intent (why it was built). The mechanism persists indefinitely. The intent decays exponentially. The half-life of intent is always shorter than the lifespan of the mechanism it created.

Why It Happens

Intent is soft tissue - contextual, implicit, distributed across people and documents. Mechanisms are fossils - structural, explicit, self-perpetuating. When a config setting is created, someone knows why. When it's inherited, the setting persists but the rationale evaporates. Three generations and the intent is below detection threshold while the mechanism keeps running.

Documentation doesn't fix it because documentation has its own intent half-life. The README was written by someone who understood the context. The next person reads it without context. The one after doesn't read it.

Why It Matters

The Governance Placebo is a special case of Intent Half-Life - a governance mechanism whose preventive intent has decayed to zero while the form continues executing. Zombie systems: structurally intact, functionally empty.

Training data encodes patterns without cautionary context (29M secrets leaked). Memory compression preserves conclusions without conditional reasoning (Compression Tax). Config files preserve settings without rationale. Definitions persist while measurement purpose becomes policy tool.

The Fix / Implication

The fix isn't better documentation. It's mechanisms that CONTAIN their intent structurally - where the "why" cannot separate from the "what." Physics-based constraints don't need to remember why they exist. A rate limiter that returns 429 IS its own documentation.

Diagnostic: can you delete all documentation and comments and still understand why a mechanism exists from its behavior alone? If not, you're running on borrowed intent.